Software and Data

R packages

This package, written with Chad Hazlett, extends Kernel Regularized Least Squares (paper here) to allow for modeling binary outcomes as well as improving the speed of the KRLS software. We also add the ability to add weights and retrieve (cluster) robust standard errors. KRLS is a flexible machine learning technique introduced by Chad Hazlett and Jens Hainmueller for fitting complex non-linear models to reduce misspecification bias.

KRLS in Julia - I have also written KRLS in Julia, which is very fast. This version does not yet include the extension to binary models, weighting, and clustered standard errors.

Part of the DeclareDesign family of packages, this package contains easy-to-use estimators for linear regression, differences-in-means, and the Horvitz-Thompson estimatr with robust standard errors while using C++ to improve speed where it counts the most.

Other projects

I worked with Jeff Lewis, Adam Boche, and Aaron Rudkin to rebuild the entire Voteview database, website, and API to provide the roll calls used often in DW-NOMINATE ideal point estimation. Our work includes creating a new Voteview.com website, accessible to all including researchers, students, and interested citizens.

Data

These repositories host cleaned candidate scrutiny forms released by the Election Commission of Pakistan for prospective candidates for Pakistan’s 2018 national and provincial assembly elections. The scrutiny forms consist of data released on tax payments from the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), corruption cases from the the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), and oustanding loans from the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP).

This data set contains a list of ~76,500 Brazilian first names and how often each name is used for a male or female candidates in elections from 1998-2014 in Brazil. Thus it effectively works as a tool to classify the gender of any Brazilian (and perhaps Portuguese) name. The original data can be found on the Brazilian Electoral Tribunal’s website here.

In total, there are 1,758,134 candidates that ran in municipal and state elections from 1998-2014 and the sex of 1,652,685 of those candidates was reported in the official data. I take the first characters in the reported names that precede a space and designate that as the candidate’s first name. This yielded 76,597 unique first names which make up this dataset. I then record the sex of each candidate and sum how many males and females were associated with each unique first name. There are errors in the names from the source dataset and there are probably errors in the reported sex as well. However, if you are matching names from your own dataset that does NOT have errors in the name, the dataset I provide here should work fairly well to predict the sex of those in your dataset.

The dataset, a codebook, and some scripts detailing a part of the data generation can all be found on my GitHub here. An older, archived version can be found on the Dataverse here.